Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan. Del Quentin Wilber. I had a hard time putting this book down. Heard the author being interviewed a few months back. He sold me on the book . . . glad he did.

Who Stole the American Dream by Hedrick Smith. Details the dismantling of the middle class by lobbyists, Congress, corporations and Wall Street. Eye-opening but depressing. Excellent source for explaining to people who they should be angry with.

I'm a Civil War buff and I have the Shelby Foote books. I've started the first one multiple times, and I just can't get very far. I'll try again at some point.

Done with the Van Halen book, now reading Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson

You might try using Shelby Foote's books to supplement whenever you might be reading about any of the various campaigns. He seems to drill down a bit deeper which I find interesting...he does write with a bit of a southern bias which is ok being that he is from Mississippi

Posted by bighooze on 1/9/2013 7:11:00 PM (view original):Who Stole the American Dream by Hedrick Smith. Details the dismantling of the middle class by lobbyists, Congress, corporations and Wall Street. Eye-opening but depressing. Excellent source for explaining to people who they should be angry with.

excellent documentary too...it airs on Link TV several times a month...I also like Capitalism Hits The Fan by Richard Wolff

I'm halfway through reading Popular Crime, Bill James branching out and writing about something other than baseball.

It is an interesting book; from the reviews I read I wasn't sure it would be good but I think a number of reviewers tended to take him literally when he was speaking more in a speculative way, trying to reason through things in the same inimitable style that made the Baseball Abstracts so great. I think the negative reviews had more to do with the reviewers expecting something else, as opposed to the book being dull and uninteresting.

The book certainly could have been improved by better editing, as there are occasional (frequent?) rants that I could do without, and way too many uses of the phrase "In my view..." His resentment towards experts on the criminal justice system, whether academics or lawyers, gets old after the first couple of rants. But on the whole, it is an interesting read, and his hypotheses and conclusions (whether crackpot or not) are generally thought-provoking.

I am guessing that since Bill James wrote it, others here have read it. What did people think?

I read "Popular Crimes" when it came out a couple of years ago. It was an enjoyable book, albeit kind of loopy in places. It doesn't rank up there with James' best baseball writing, but he's certainly got some interesting ideas. James has also apparently read every crime book ever written, and I picked up a few of the books he recommended here (Joseph Wambaugh's "The Onion Field" being the best one).

I just finished "I'm Your Man," the new Leonard Cohen biography. I've been a Cohen fan for many years, but I only decided to pick this up after seeing him live a couple of months ago and being blown away by how good he still is (78 years old!). The bio was smartly written, although at 500+ pages it's definitely for the hard-core fan only. Funniest tidbit: While in LA in the '80s, Leonard came across a personal ad from a woman looking for a man who had "the fearlessness of Iggy Pop and the elegant wit of Leonard Cohen." Cohen happened to know that Iggy Pop was in town recording an album, and he approached him about getting the woman's address and showing up on her doorstep to surprise her. Oddly enough, it was the "fearless" Iggy Pop who backed out of the plan.

JGA Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment - I feel like a fool for not having read it literally decades ago. One of the very best books ever on politics and political thought ever. I can't remember the last time I purposely read a book slowly because I wanted to digest each idea for a while before going on to the next thing that would blow my mind.

If you are looking for a book that really does have a different paradigm from the individualist/liberalism that dominates thought nearly everywhere in past decades, it is not a quick read, but it is brilliantly written and you will find it here.